​On a 1200 km trek across India from New Delhi to Jamnagar, the train passed fields of hovels — pieces of tin leaning against each other — and the humans who survived in them. Children ran naked, adults urinated openly, and from all appearances there was great suffering.

When we arrived in Jamnagar, in the home of a guru/teacher, I asked why the government doesn't do more to help the people. He replied, 'It is because of religion. The people want to suffer, because they believe their suffering here will benefit them in the afterlife.'

Working as a light touch energy healer in Spain, I learned that some people choose to be sick and dependent. When one client realized she could be free from her illness, she stopped the sessions because being healed would mean losing her financial support. Others in my experience as a therapeutic couple with my wife wanted to be sick to get attention or to be in a position to control others.

How can people be helped if they want to suffer? Clearly, they cannot. The choice to be healed or not comes only from within. Neither can one person empower another, as the same applies.

However, except in emergencies, whatever aid is offered will be highly more effective in the larger picture if at the same time new, supportive thought patterns are impartially introduced by those who are already living from them.

In these days, people and organizations claiming to offer a better world are popping up like mushrooms after a rain. Some focus on housing the homeless, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick or for threatened animal species. Others promote new and innovative technologies for solving problems of pollution, inadequate water or energy supplies, and so on. Some propose whole new systems to replace currency and traditional governance. Those all have positive qualities or potential for bringing some betterment, but they will not in themselves make a better world as a whole.

'We're making a better world,' some say, 'with more freedom and equality for everyone.' Yet they limit their new world by making themselves important, exclusive, and competitive. People and organizations making such pronouncements often use words like 'equality' and 'respect' — which are realized only in slogans rather than actions.

'We're modeling a new paradigm,' they claim, 'come get your spot before your neighbor does.' They are doing nothing more than regurgitating the old paradigm of exclusiveness, competition, greed and fear for survival. A new gift-wrapping does not change what is inside.

A quick Google search brought up this example, 'The Better World Campaign (BWC) works to foster a strong partnership between the United States and the United Nations to promote core American interests.' My question, without looking further into what the BWC is or what it does, is, 'how does promoting the interests of one people, one country, make a better world?' In general, would doing so not inevitably be against the interests of some other country or people?

We are either one humanity or we are nothing. I would be in alignment with and supportive of a mission to promote the interests of the earth and her inhabitants in service to the source of life.

I know my ideas will not suit everyone reading this, and that is okay. Nature loves diversity and so do I. My feeling is that unless the psycho-spiritual evolution of the individual is central, nothing else will make a better world in the long run.

In the Collective Evolution discussion which began with the question, 'What is your highest potential?', Xan Maranya wrote, 'If we anticipate the future effects of discovering our silent essence we will keep ourselves involved in the mind rather than truly investigating the open silence space of being.' Such comments (with my on-going practice) help me evolve past my old paradigm of living mostly in a mental world.

One thing which *will* make a better world is more people living from their open silence space of being. On the carton of Good Karma Flax Milk, it says, 'Just as great nutrition can start with a small yet powerful flax seed, we believe we can create a better world with the tiny but mighty choices we make every day.' Now, that has something.